The invention relates to the field of electronic mail (email) systems, and in particular, to managing email.
Typically, when users of an email system are going to be out of the office or otherwise unable to read incoming email messages, the users configure the email system to operate in an out of office mode. The out of office mode notifies senders that the recipient is not receiving email messages at that time and stores the email messages for the user to review upon his return. When the user returns, a huge number of emails may need to be reviewed, without easily assessing the ones to be treated with the highest priority. Some emails may have been sent with an importance field set as high. However, since the importance field is set by the sender and not the receiver, what is important for the sender may not be important for the receiver. Furthermore, when many emails are specified as being important a user will still need to assess which ones deserve to be treated first.